From left to right, Levi Li, Henry Kwan and Samuel Tedesco – all senior mechanical engineering majors at UB – are among the finalists for a NASA-sponsored contest to design a heat shield for future missions to Mars. Credit: Douglas Levere.

“This is a fantastic example of the skills and tenacity that our students are known for, and of the opportunities available to students at UB.”

Kemper Lewis, professor and chair

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Inflatable heat shield rendering

Inflatable heat shield rendering

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The path for humans to Mars could be paved
by University at Buffalo students.

A team of five UB student engineers developed plans for a
massive inflatable heat shield designed to protect spacecraft
– and potentially astronauts – from the white-hot heat
that objects encounter upon entering the red planet’s
atmosphere.

The team’s work impressed NASA and partner organization,
the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), which last fall called
upon college students nationwide to submit proposals for a contest
called the Breakthrough, Innovate, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea
Challenge.

Earlier this spring, NASA and NIA chose the top four plans,
which came from students at UB, Georgia Tech, Purdue University and
the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Now, contest
organizers are flying the teams to NASA Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia, where they will present their plans to a panel
of judges on April 25-26.

The winning team will be offered paid summer internships at NASA
Langley and, potentially, the chance to flight test their
concept.

“To have NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace
evaluate our plan is really an honor. We’re looking forward
to hearing their feedback and, of course, spending time at NASA
Langley,” said Henry Kwan, a UB senior mechanical engineering
major from Buffalo who helped create the plan.

In addition to Kwan, the other team members are: Anish Kumar,
who graduated from UB in 2015; Levi Li, a senior from Queens;
Anibal Martinez, who graduated from UB in 2015; and Samuel Tedesco,
a senior from Verona Beach. All are students of UB’s
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and all except
Kumar will travel to Virginia.

Contest organizers asked the teams to develop plans for a
heatshield – hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator
(HIAD), in NASA speak – much larger than what NASA recently
used to land the rover Curiosity on Mars. (The Curiosity
heatshield, at roughly 15 feet in diameter, protected the car-sized
rover from the 3,800◦F temperatures it encountered entering
the atmosphere of Mars.)

The contest dovetails with NASA’s ongoing efforts to
develop a new class of heatshields to carry vehicles that weigh up
to 30 tons (by contrast, Curiosity weighed 1 ton) to Mars.
Potentially, NASA plans to use this type of heatshield for its
planned human missions to Mars in the 2030s.

Kemper Lewis, PhD, professor and chair of UB’s Department
of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the team’s faculty
advisor. He praised the students’ top-notch work.

“Our students’ effort on this project has been
incredible, and the early results, being among four colleges chosen
from a nationwide pool, indicate that NASA and the National
Institute of Aerospace agree,” he said. “This is a
fantastic example of the skills and tenacity that our students are
known for, and of the opportunities available to students at
UB.”